(Part 1 of 2)

The state of California’s unclaimed money program takes in approximately three hundred million dollars every year. Why should you care? Well, if you or anyone you know is or was a resident of the Golden State (or had any kind of business dealings, whether you were aware of it or not), some of that big heap of California unclaimed money might very well belong to you!

Under the California unclaimed property law, abandoned assets like forgotten savings and checking accounts, cash and stock dividends, mineral deposits, uncashed checks and money orders, state of California unclaimed tax refunds, salary checks, gift certificates, and other assets are handed over to the Department of the Treasury if their owners don’t come for them within a certain time period. This ‘dormancy period’ varies from state to state, but in California it’s 3 years. These forgotten funds then go to the CA unclaimed property division, where they stay in the state’s general fund until they are returned to the people they truly belong to. This is where state officials who handled California unclaimed cash were recently criticized. Seems that they have been all to happy to locate and collect the lost funds from the establishments holding them but but were less than enthusiastic about tracking down the actual owners in the California unclaimed property list.

One of the main reasons for the inability of government to return forgotten money to its owners, they say, is that they can’t be located. Problem is, would would ever think that people like ZsaZsa Gabor, Angelina Jolie, Victoria Beckham, Gerri Halliwell, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Lopez, Adam Sandler and Marlon Brando would be hard to locate? Those names and the names of a number of other celebrities are just some of the names in the California missing money database and yet they have not been contacted by the employees in the California Unclaimed Funds Division. They’re all owed checks for forgotten funds by California amounting from hundreds to the thousands as in the case of Angelina Jolie. This just shows California state officials’ interest in keeping this money in the general fund for use in balancing the budget deficit for as long as they possibly can. As a matter of fact, there was a recent ruling by a federal judge on CA abandoned assets, saying that the state was not doing enough to locate the rightful owners and has temporarily halted the state’s s ability to seize it until a better policy of reuniting it with the rightful owners was adopted.

(to be continued)

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